ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Mann's Joseph and His Brothers is primarily a comic work is to say no more than the author himself said in his foreword to the new edition of 1948. Neither, of course, does Mann think simply that; his subject matter after all is never anything but Joseph and his father and his brothers, and the wonderful world of Egypt where he spent his most brilliant years, just as in The Magic Mountain, Mann's other masterpiece which deals with time, the subject matter is whatever the persons of the story talk about when their excellent brains catch fire in the cold solitude of an Alpine sanatarium. Perhaps it was human nature that Mann lived with during the sixteen dreadful years, between 1926 and 1942, when he was composing Joseph and His Brothers. Mann's method of amplification is simple in one sense: it is the method of filling in, of stuffing interstices with matter he thinks belongs there.
